


A Philosophy of Right

by schiarire



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-06-13
Updated: 2007-06-13
Packaged: 2017-10-26 04:53:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/278908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schiarire/pseuds/schiarire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"At university, Laura is president of a student organization that meets every second Tuesday to decry human rights abuses, drink instant coffee, and draft letters of civil protest to Tuesday's abusers. Laura prefers loose-leaf tea, but student organizations, like human rights, run on a budget."</p><p>Laura Roslin as a university student.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Philosophy of Right

At university, Laura is president of a student organization that meets every second Tuesday to decry human rights abuses, drink instant coffee, and draft letters of civil protest to Tuesday's abusers. Laura prefers loose-leaf tea, but student organizations, like human rights, run on a budget. They meet in an empty classroom where she has grown used to her place at the front. And where, from time to time, a girl will break down in tears.

Laura is not unsympathetic to the temptation to cry over infants dashed out against cold, hard cement. But she has made it a principle not to succumb to this temptation in public. It would be bad form, and furthermore, it would mean that she could never do it again. At least not from the front of the room. Since she realized that she numbered among them, she has been watching the progress of bleeding hearts, and has learned that they only rise so far, unless dampened by compromise, outer steel. There is a glass ceiling she thinks of in this case as _efficiency_. It does her good to see her origins – a sodden, oversensible heap, thus reduced by the cruelties of human circumstance – developed in others. It reminds her what a long way she has yet to go.

She has determined that balance, above all, is key to leaving the world a little cleaner than when she came into it. She cannot eradicate in one movement poverty, hunger, intolerance. Nor from one office. Nor in one lifetime. So she has decided, in the face of insurmountable odds, to cast rocks up at them from the ground: smash the windows. To be a locus of change she must be local. Laura Roslin will be a teacher; this is simply expedient. It is the means she has hit on to eliminate as many evils as possible in as many minds as possible in as short a time as possible. The chief evil here is not Ignorance; rather Apathy. Ignorance can be corrected at any age, but Apathy sets in early and propagates itself, like a wasp driving eggs into soft, yielding flesh.

x

Ethics sounds like (mathem)atics because the two are alike. Laura is working on a certificate in Social and Political Thought, and this revelation came easier to her than it does to most. The way she sees it is, sentiment is the enemy. Sentiment is you sobbing, Why, why? over your father's corpse while the house burns down all around you. Ethics would be you seizing a fire extinguisher, or else shepherding the living out the flaming door. If you can save ten children, or you can save your child, you save the ten. And the voice inside that says _no_ will at the very least live to get therapy. The way forward is practicable, or else not at all.

Laura has also learned that these ethics are unpopular outside of certain circles, and that even within those circles, should the proponents' own lives be threatened, many of them would be quick to save themselves over nameless Others. Therefore a certain circumspection is required: in speech, in writing, but never in thought. She knows exactly where her conclusions come from. And she knows exactly what it cost her to arrive there.

It does not do, Laura knows, to lie to oneself about these things. She is not thinking anything wrong. She just knows better than (almost) everyone else does.

x

When she has almost done with her degree, and when her thesis, which has to do with potential criteria for humanitarian intervention, needs only a thorough formatting check to be complete, she hosts a networking event for likeminded compulsive gooddoers. It is wine and cheese and an option for those who abjure cheese. Laura is wearing a wrap and her hair down. She is talking to a representative of an organization that sends graduates out into the neediest quarters and asks them, in two years, to change lives. Laura thinks she'd be up to the challenge.

"Excuse me," says someone, and butts in. They are a dark, nervous-looking youth with extremely current glasses. They are probably someone's younger brother, and she looks over their head, expecting to see another teenage boy waiting for them with impatient glee. But to her surprise, there is no one there.

"Yes?" says Laura, quite pleasant.

The youth, unexpectedly, shoves out his hand. "My name is Gaius Baltar," he says, with the affected tones of one who is going to grow into charm. "I admire your work."

"Thank you," says Laura, and ignites the warm smile. "Are you here with your brother or sister?" Baltar's hand is a little bit sweaty. That will be harder to change, she thinks, than his voice.

He isn't quick enough to hide that he finds her comment condescending -- yet. But he says, "No -- I'm a student."

"Really?" Laura asks. "Here? Why haven't I seen you before?"

Baltar backtracks, "I meant, I'm starting here in the fall."

"Oh." She does the smile again. "How nice."

In the most genuine move of the evening, he laughs, and it sounds exactly as oh-gods as she thinks he feels. "Yes," he says. He flattens his palms together, long fingers set straight and smooth. "It is very nice. I don't suppose you have any advice for me?"

"Advice?"

"Yes," says Baltar, "advice. You look -- " his eyes go up and down behind polished glass " -- very successful."

Laura is less sure of this. "Thank you," she says. "Well. I think you should work hard, of course. But not too hard. And you should keep good company."

Preferably, the sort of company that will work for you years down the line for almost no money because they remember the idealism you nurtured together, long ago.

Baltar is nodding, sycophantish, long hair everywhere. "I'll try not to fall in with a bad crowd," he says. This is a joke. It is almost funny.

x

That night Laura sleeps badly. In her dreams she is long dividing life, and someone with a blank where their face should be checks her answers on the other side of a big, busy desk. She does not know why. She knows she is correct. The windows are small and round, as if someone were outside, and wanted to force their way in, and measures had been taken against this. Bars, she thinks. She must have bars.

But cannot.

There comes the noise of middle-distance bells. They are like an S.O.S. She does not know who needs help, or she would know how to help them. This above all is unbearable.

In her dreams she is kneeling in prayer, and someone is saying prayers over her. When she wakes she is quite secular.


End file.
